Cross-language Morphological Awareness Transfer In ESL Reading

Morphological awareness refers to the ability in recognizing, understanding and use of word parts that carry meaning (McBride-Chang, Wagner, Muse&Shu,2005b). It is a facet of linguistic competence, which facilitates learners to analyse the morphological structure of words so as to perform better in learning morphologically complex words. Morphological awareness is regarded as one aspect of metalinguistic awareness. Language learners with stronger metalinguistic awareness generally have a good command of the structural features of language and are able to understand the meaning conveyed by language itself, which would efficiently facilitate the development of language ability (Li, Anderson, Nagy&Zhang,2002; Feng,2005).Previous literature has found that morphological awareness has an important effect on children’s literacy ability (e.g. Chen, Hao, Geva, Zhu&Shu,2009; Carlisle and Fleming,2003; Li, Dong, Zhu, Liu&Wu,2009), and the transfer of morphological awareness would facilitate the L2literacy development (e.g. Bialystok, McBride-Chang&Luk,2005). Nevertheless, the study about the effects of Chinese morphological awareness on primary students’ English learning is still not sufficient. Hence, the present study aims to investigate the development of Chinese and English morphological awareness among primary school students, and the direct or indirect transferring effects of morphological awareness in L2reading. On the basis of previous literature and the related theoretical framework, the following research questions have been proposed: 1. How does the L1and L2morphological awareness develop between two different grades, and whether morphological awareness would change in accordance with different language proficiency between the two grades?2. How would the cross-language transfer of morphological awareness affect English reading comprehension ability directly or indirectly?The research participants were90fifth graders and86sixth graders from a primary school in Lanzhou. Each grade was an experimental group and consisted with two natural classes. They were administrated with a series of tasks including English and Chinese morphological awareness, English word recognizing ability, and English and Chinese reading comprehension. A questionnaire about students’demographic information, including their extra-curriculum English learning information and the English score of last exam, has been conducted as well. The results of the tasks were analyzed by SPSS17.0.Analysis of the results shows that on one hand, morphological awareness of6th graders performs better than5th graders in general; and the development of morphological awareness is in line with students’ literacy competence. In particular, English compound awareness develops more significantly than inflectional and derivational awareness. On the other hand, English morphological awareness directly facilitates the development of English reading comprehension via the mediation of English word recognizing ability, while Chinese morphological awareness affects English reading comprehension indirectly via the influence of transfer on English morphological awareness. It is worth noticing that the Chinese compound awareness has a predicting power on English morphological awareness. The present study attempts to investigate the development of morphological awareness and its cross-language transfer between two typologically-distant languages. It is hoped that this research could shed light on the role of morphological awareness in L2literacy development, and provides theoretical and empirical support for the effects of morphological awareness in learning to reading.